“You’re going to be fine,” said Laila softly. “You have the bearing of a baroness. Now you have to believe it.”
Laila took the dress off the hanger, bringing it toward Zofia. Zofia recoiled. She thought of the women she had studied in the lobby. They looked terribly uncomfortable. All cinched waists and pinched shoes. Laughing at unfunny things.
“Try it on!” said Laila. “My couturier at the House of Worth made it especially for you. There’s a changing screen right—”
Zofia shrugged off her apron, kicked off her shoes, and started shucking off her clothes.
Laila laughed, shaking her head. “Or that.”
Zofia knew that weighted sigh.
Her mother used to make that sound all the time whenever she thought Zofia lacked modesty. “Lacking.” Another word that did not fit. It was not as if she had some secret stash of modesty and had used it all up. She had learned what was considered modest. Taking off one’s clothes in public? Bad. In private? Fine. This was a closed room which meant private. Who cared? Besides, she never liked the feel of too much clothing. And she didn’t understand why she had to be self-conscious of her body anyway. It was just a body.
All the same, Zofia missed the sound of her mother’s sigh. After their parents died in the house fire, Hela had done her best not to fill their days with grief, but it seeped into the cracks of their life anyway.
“Tell me when you can’t breathe,” grunted Laila, pulling the stays.
“That. Makes. No. Sense.”
“Fashion, my love, just like the universe, owes you neither explanation nor rationale.”
Zofia tried to make a sound of protest, but ended up gasping.
“Tight enough!” announced Laila. “Arms up!”
Zofia obeyed. Black silk shimmered around her. She glanced down, noting the perfectly round beads of jet that frothed at the hem like black waves. They were Forged too, and the waves rippled and pulsed down the fabric. Zofia’s mind latched onto the pattern.
“Not discovered until 1746 by d’Alembert.”
Laila paused in her ministrations. “You lost me.”
“Waves!” said Zofia, pointing at the pattern of black beading.“Classical physics has lots of waves. They’re a beautiful hyperbolic partial differential equation. There’s sound waves, light waves, water waves—”
The rest of the room fell away while Zofia talked about waves. Her father, a physics professor in Glowno, had taught her all about recognizing the beauty of mathematics. How one could hear it—even the effect of waves—in something as complex as a piece of music. As she spoke, she hardly felt Laila pulling on the corset stays, sliding her feet into shoes, or tugging at her hair.
“—and, lastly, longitudinal and transverse waves,” she finished, looking up.
But it was not Laila’s face she saw, but her own, staring back at her in the mirror’s reflection. She did not look like herself. There was black smudged on her eyes. Red on her mouth and cheeks. An aigrette fastener, with a white plume and gray pearls, pinned to coiled-up hair. She looked like the women in the grand lobby. Zofia reached up to touch the elegant bun on top of her head.
“You look beautiful, Baroness Sophia Ossokina.”
Zofia leaned forward, scrutinizing her reflection. She might look like the women in the lobby, but she was nothing like them. If anything, Laila was. Laila, who was as elegant as a wave.
“It should be you,” said Zofia.
Laila’s eyes widened in the mirror. Her shoulders fell slightly. A pattern of sorrow.
“I can’t,” she said softly. “You remember what Séverin said. If you dress to the world’s expectations, it doesn’t look too closely when you steal from it. Though I do wish I didn’t have to go as a nautch dancer.” Her mouth twisted on that word. “Nautch dancers used to be sacred in temples. Where I’m from, dancing is an expression of the divine.”
“Like at the Palais des Rêves?”
Laila snorted. “No.Notlike at the Palais. It’s not even me on that stage. Even if it were, no one deserves a performance of my faith.”
Zofia pulled at the tips of her gloves. The right words kept hitting her tongue wrong. Laila looked at her, concern etched on her features. Then she reached out, cupping her chin.
“Oh, Zofia,” she said. “Don’t be sad. Everyone hides.”
ZOFIA WAS THEfirst to board the train.
